Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Our household tries to be good eco-citizens.  We recycle.  We take the old fluorescent lights to one place to be disposed of properly and the dead batteries to another place.  We save up plastic films to drop at the supermarket in the perhaps naïve belief that they will be turned into flip flops or something.  My thermostat in the winter is set to 60 degrees, and my swamp cooler only runs at night during the summer.  We turn the key to be idle free. 

One disheartening thing about my journey through the Stans is seeing how meager are our dutiful household efforts beside an entire continent of indifference. At the supermarket here, you get your orange in a plastic bag, that gets weighed and put into a plastic bag with a price sticker on it, and then the cashier puts it into a bigger plastic bag.  The cars here, many of them holdovers from Soviet times, with their Soviet emissions systems still in place, spew particulates gleefully into the atmosphere, such that it is both visible and chewy.  As I arrived in Bishkek, my throat actually closed up, refusing to allow me to inhale.  Anywhere there is traffic—and there is traffic everywhere in Bishkek—there’s a murky, sallow, asthmatic’s-nightmare of gloom hovering around head-high, just where the nostrils sit.  And this miasma is kept in place by the heavy coal smoke sitting like a lid on this whole basin, snug against some truly beautiful mountains that, most days, cannot be seen from the heart of town 20 miles away.

I have never felt such an immediate, visceral loathing of a city as I feel for Bishkek. It’s the air.  It’s the plastic garbage everywhere along the roads.  It’s the surprising poverty of vegetarian food.  It’s the enduring Russian-ness of it all, which has apparently overwritten Kyrgyz heritage and language. 

I know that Kyrgyzstan is more than this city.  I’m looking forward to getting out of this city and into the rest of the country.  In the meantime, you’ll find me in the corner café eating a small bowl of vegetable soup.  If you can see me through the haze.

(Bishkek from a distance)